


Some of Them Want to Use You

by thequidditchpitch_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Dark, Heroes to Villains, The Quidditch Pitch: Going Under
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-31
Updated: 2007-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-27 12:00:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10808601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thequidditchpitch_archivist/pseuds/thequidditchpitch_archivist
Summary: Harry is haunted by an imaginary friend.





	Some of Them Want to Use You

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Annie, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Quidditch Pitch](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Quidditch_Pitch), which went offline in 2015 when the hosting expired, at a time I was not able to renew it. I contacted Open Doors, hoping to preserve the archive using an old backup, and began importing these works as an Open Doors-approved project in April 2017. Open Doors e-mailed all authors about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact us using the e-mail address on [The Quidditch Pitch collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thequidditchpitch/profile).

Only a few days after Albus Dumbledore died, Harry Potter began remembering things. It was as if a mist was fading from the face of a mirror and he was looking back into his own eyes again, remembering who he was, after years of not quite seeing things properly.  
  
Years of wishful thinking, hazing his memory like a benevolent charm; a spiritual aspirin in his bloodstream. In the first days back at the Burrow, when he should have been in mourning, he found himself alive with anticipation, his mind a maelstrom of secrets, like someone waking up from a true, but confusing, dream.  
  
And because he could only remember these things when he was halfway between sleep and waking, he spent a lot of time in those first few days, curling up in dark corners of the house (and there were a lot of dark corners at the Burrow), out in the garden somewhere, under a blackcurrant bush, or down by the river, where Ron and Hermione couldn't find him, at least for a few precious hours.  
  
He knew that Dumbledore would not have wanted any of this, but it didn't matter anymore, because Harry was remembering the time before he knew Dumbledore. He was remembering, at last, where he had first met Tom Riddle.  
  
It was in the cupboard under the stairs.  
  
***  
  
"I knew you'd come back," said the boy with black hair and green eyes, a satisfied smile curving around the worm-eaten apple. "I knew you weren't just in my head."  
  
"I feel like I've been away for years," said Harry. He was back in the garden outside the orphanage, under the gnarled old apple trees that grew by the wall, the brick wall that shut out the cemetery, and the old chapel in the middle of it, that nobody used any more.  
  
It was summer and the garden was silent, struck dumb in the heat. There was the faint humming of bees and the dull rumble of London that was always there, on the other side of the walls, but there were no human voices to disturb them. At this time of day the other children were lying down on their beds, after dinner, reading books or playing quietly inside. Or they were supposed to be.  
  
"Well, you look the same to me," said the boy. He threw away the last of the apple and came out from the shadows of the trees, pale and skinny under his shock of black hair, so much like Harry, so much not. "We've got an hour before Matron does the rounds. We should hurry. I've got something to show you. In the cemetery."  
  
"Cool," said Harry, who had never visited a cemetery or an orchard at all, in his other life, where he had only known Little Whingeing Junior School, Privet Drive and the dark space under the stairs where he slept with the dust and the spiders.  
  
They scrambled over the high wall with surprising ease, and there was that odd feeling that Harry got sometimes, when he grabbed on to Tom's hand, as if he was flying.  
  
Although that was impossible, he knew. Unless this really was a dream.  
  
***  
  
The cemetery was a wild space of crazy briars and broken stone; and like all such places, it felt peaceful and unlived-in, a quiet space out of time, a place reserved for sitting and thinking. The other times that they met up, that was often all they did; they walked around the graves and traced out the names, eating apples and talking about things.  
  
Once, they passed a stolen bottle of gin backwards and forwards, spluttering; daring each other to drink as much as they could before the sky above began spinning around like an umbrella and they fell backwards on the long grass, giggling helplessly. But they felt so sick after that experiment, that they never tried it again.  
  
There was a small library in the orphanage, the books donated by some rich dead old lady, and Tom had read nearly every book in it, or so it seemed. His favourite book was the story of Peter Pan, who could fly, and who lived in a place called Never Never Land with the Lost Boys, and who never, ever grew up.  
  
Tom never tired of telling Harry that one, but there were other stories as well, and a lot of them, Harry knew, came straight out of Tom's head. Harry never tried to make up anything, himself, he was happy just to sit in the sun, or stretch out on top of a tombstone, half asleep, and listen.  
  
But this time, Tom wasn't in the mood for telling stories, he was impatient, in a hurry; he had something to show him.  
  
"I finally found it. I finally found the way in," he said, over his shoulder, wading through the long grass.  
  
As always, Tom was wearing faded grey trousers that were a shade too big for him, and braces, which nobody wore anymore, and a white shirt that had been washed so many times that you could see right through it when he stood against the sun. Tom didn't wear trainers like Harry, he wore boots that came up above his ankles, with heavy nailed-on soles, the sort of shoes that could go anywhere. In the deep pockets of his trousers he carried useful things, like a pocket knife and a ball of string, and always, something wrong but interesting, a stolen necklace or somebody else's love letter, perhaps.  
  
When Tom wasn't with Harry, Tom spent a lot of time running away from the orphanage and travelling around London. He told Harry that when he stopped grownups on the street and asked them for bus money, they always gave it to him, and Harry believed him, because Tom was like that, he had a way of making you want to do what he asked of you, without asking too many awkward questions.  
  
Tom had been everywhere, it seemed, but up until now, he had not been able to get into the little room he knew was hidden under the floor of the disused chapel, and it had been eating away at his mind. When Harry asked him how he knew it was there, he would never say, except to remind Harry that he just knew things, sometimes, it was what made him different. Like Harry. They were different, the two of them, and they knew it. They didn't know how they knew it, they just did.  
  
***  
  
The chapel was brick, built over the site of an old monastery which had been replaced with the charitable institution that later became the orphanage, although it had been used for several different purposes, before that.  
  
The two children only knew that the place felt dead and gloomy, as though the people who built it had not cared about what they were doing enough to put their whole hearts into it, as they should have. It was something that was only pretending to be magical, and for that reason they had no respect for it.  
  
Now they scrambled up the wall and slithered through a hole in a stained glass window, a window which had once depicted Jesus blessing the little children, but now only depicted Jesus with his arms out, blessing nobody; looking like a mournfully ineffective Sunday School teacher.  
  
Harry knew that many of the pieces of coloured glass from the window were hidden away in Tom's wardrobe, in his bedroom, where Harry had never been. On the long slow afternoons when he was locked in his room, he told Harry, he would take the pieces of glass out and hold them up to the sun, turning the patch of sunlight on his wall from white to red, to blue, to purple, to green. Like a magician.  
  
"Do you believe in magic, Harry? Really?" he would ask, once in a while, for no apparent reason, and Harry would always answer yeah, course I do. Because it was true. He had nothing else to believe in, but he knew he could visit Tom just by shutting his eyes and willing himself there, in the garden, and that had to be magic, surely?  
  
And there were other things, which he had had no other word for, things nobody ever spoke of, until Tom taught him what to call them. He would call it magic, he decided, until somebody taught him a better word for it.  
  
***  
  
They dropped down into the dark space that was visited only by rats and smelled of wood-mould; the only beautiful thing in it the coloured sunlight on the floor.  
  
Harry remembered as if it was yesterday, the first time Tom had brought him here, and made him cut his left hand open with the pocket knife and squeeze it against the matching cut on Tom's hand, so that their blood dripped down onto the place where the altar would have been, if there had still been an altar there.  
  
"Forever and ever," Tom had whispered. Harry had stared into the eyes that were the same colour as his own and had nodded, seriously, because with Tom Riddle everything was serious, Tom Riddle never, ever said anything he didn't really mean.  
  
But this time, Tom led him straight towards the back of the chapel, behind the altar, and began pulling up tiles and clearing away timber until there was quite a large hole there, or large enough for a ten year old boy to squeeze through, at least. Then he took out two candle stubs from his pockets and lit one, passing it to Harry, then held out his own, so that it flared up in the darkness and caught fire, the light twinkling in the huge pupils of his eyes, like the light of two dying stars.  
  
"You ready?" he asked, and Harry, who never said very much in these dreams, just nodded, at first. Of course he was ready, he had been waiting for something like this to happen all his life. He was impatient for something that would take him right out of the cupboard under the stairs, something that would bind him permanently to Tom, and stop him from ever going back there again.  
  
"Course I am," he said hoarsely, finding his voice. "Let's just do it, shall we?"  
  
They did not drop this time, but slid, down a slope of rubble and earth, into a vault under the ground which breathed moisture and tasted like death. An old death, but a powerful one.  
  
"This is real magic, Harry," said Tom, breathlessly. "This is the real thing. I'll show you..."  
  
There was nothing much to see in the candlelight, just stone, bowed with the weight of the earth above it, eaten through by roots. The flags under their feet were broken and pushed upward by the force of the green things growing secretly underneath them; there were carved archways overhead, but they were mossy and so worn away that it was hard to imagine them as they must once have been.  
  
Harry found himself gripped by the flapping wings of panic that so often took him when he was shut in somewhere and locked away, in the dark. But it didn't matter so much this time, because Tom was with him, and Tom always knew what he was doing.  
  
"I've found a dead person," said Tom, now kneeling down in front of a dark hole in the floor, at the far end, holding up his candle. "Don't worry, Harry, she's just bones now. I think she was a girl. She was buried with a mirror, and I think it must be magic, because when I touch it..."  
  
"No, don't touch it," said Harry, "I don't think you should touch it, Tom..." but Tom reached down into the grave anyway, and then the scene went from black and shadowy, to blank and bleached-white, like an overexposed photo.  
  
Then Harry woke up with a shuddering intake of breath and found that he was sixteen years old, and Ginny was shaking his shoulder and saying something about snapping out of it and getting it together, about never going back.  
  
He woke up and it was 1997, it was high summer, and it felt like the weight of the world was pressing down on top of him, like a tombstone.  



End file.
